Cages
by Empatheia
Summary: -Kimimaro- People can do terrible things when they are afraid. People who are afraid of their own children can do worse.


_**Cages**_

The first rite of passage of the Kaguya clan usually took place on one's fifteenth birthday.

Kimimaro was seven when they came for him. They had all felt it, and they were all frightened. Frightened of him. His father told him later that even before he had left his mother's womb, the strangeness had surrounded him, a distortion somehow sliding beneath the air itself.

They had planned to wait. The fear won out much earlier than expected.

They woke him with the late autumn sun, and gave him just enough time to dress himself against the chill. With very little pomp or ceremony, let alone warning, he was escorted to a squat wooden building at the back of the compound by his father – his only living parent – and whomever else wished to bear witness. There were friends among that small crowd, though not many. The building held only one large room, with a high, drafty ceilling and unadorned walls.

The only object in it was a chair, standing alone in the center.

They carefully gagged him – the object, after all, was not his death, though he thought they would not much mourn that outcome – and tied him by his shoulders and hips to the chair. The chair was very old. Very strong. Every crack in its ancient finish was stained black, and those with any talent for detecting lingering spiritual stains at all could feel the terrible miasma which leaked from it. It was a place of suffering.

Kimimaro understood that the moment the new, rough-edged leather straps touched his skin. They had not told him anything of what to expect, but the chair told him everything he needed to know.

They were _terrified_ of him. He could see it in the way they struggled to feign casual disinterest, and overshot the mark. Oh, but they had high hopes for him, they insisted. His elder brother and sister were no good, they had no sense. If he passed, they would make him the heir, they promised. Not to worry. It was just a formality.

No one had been born with the curse in nearly fifteen years. It had probably been bred out, and good riddance. When it was over, the medics would patch him up, and soon enough he'd be good as new. They wouldn't waste a child of his talent. Not to worry. It would be over soon. He would be fine. Not to worry.

Over and over again, they lied to reassure him. He ignored them. The chair was the only one in the room worth listening to.

Perhaps they were right. Perhaps he _would_ pass, prove himself to be worthy of the title they desperately wished to saddle him with. But their arrogant self-assurance, in deliberate denial of the possibility of failure and therefore of reality, irritated him. It was nothing short of or greater than cowardice.

Oh, it was very possible he would pass. But he would not do it to make them pat him on the head and congratulate him on being exactly what they wanted him to be. He had never been openly rebellious, but there were limits. He would draw his line here and stand behind it until they bent, or broke.

The gag dampened in his mouth. He tested the straps, tentatively. They held firm, as he had known they would. He would stay here until they let him go… or until he found new strength, sufficient to take his freedom with his own hands. That was all right. He was not afraid.

There was a brief ceremony. There was a speech, cut short by the overbearing power of the anticipatory hush. And then the person chosen to test him – a man, ten years his senior, one whose face was too unremarkable to summon up the name Kimimaro most likely knew – hefted the great black staff in both hands and began.

The left forearm, he learned later, was the traditional starting point. Being afraid of a tiny, cold-eyed child must have angered the nondescript examiner, however, because he started with the left kneecap instead.

Kimimaro learned a great deal about pain in those first few minutes.

Everyone had always told him how impressive his self-control was, in one so young. He had made the mistake of taking their praise to heart, which was something he was usually self-aware enough to avoid. He realized the full depth of that error right then. Perhaps he was impressive for a child, but this was not a test for children, and he was not, _could_ not be ready.

The examiner worked with a slow, steady rhythm with no pauses, no hint of mercy in his eyes. The witnesses sat in silence and watched. His father's eyes, too, were impassive. If his child's pain wounded him, he showed not the slightest hint of it on his face. Self-control. Discipline. There was a reason those words and others like them were staples of the clan's insular dialect: the ideals they strove for, and ironically often the weakest of their inborn traits. Why else would they lose a battle with fear over a mere child?

Kimimaro learned a little more about pain when he reached out for succor from one who should have given it without question and found nothing but cold air.

The only real comfort he could find was in the sound of his destruction. Terrible as it was, it had been a lullaby for the true Kaguya heirs for some centuries, and it was in his blood. The wet cracking of bone, the sucking tear of flesh, these he knew, though it had never been _his_ bones or flesh until now, and never for this purpose. Cruel comfort, and thin. He clung to it like sodden driftwood afloat in a wide red sea.

Once he was sufficiently shattered, the witnesses withdrew to the walls of the hut, to sit and watch and wait in silence for his answer.

It was late morning by now, he guessed. They would wait until dawn of the next day. Perhaps even a little longer, just to be sure, because they feared him so desperately. What he might be. What memories he might wake in their finally dormant bloodline.

He knew what they wanted, now. They had broken him to see if he would fix himself. Was he cursed with the alien body of the clan founders, the unholy power over bone and marrow, or was he a slave to his mute and obstinate body as they were? As was right and natural?

Kimimaro looked inwards for the answer, and found it, exactly where he had expected to find it, and in exactly the form he had expected to find it.

Then he waited.

There was a strange, dim satisfaction in watching the faces of his horde of witnesses as the hours slowly wheeled past and nothing happened. He gritted his teeth and felt the capillaries in his eyes pop with the effort of keeping silent, but he did nothing else.

Endure the pain. Wait.

As midnight passed, and then each sharp-edged hour of the earliest morning, and the sun neared the lip of the earth and the horizon began to glow, they grew increasingly nervous, though they ought to have been more relaxed. Perhaps this was when most of those who were going to fail the test finally ran out of endurance and surrendered to the power in order to escape their torment.

It was only pain. He would wait. Wait and endure.

It was terrible, though. As his smashed body began to try and repair itself, the burning began, and a powerful searing ache that coiled through through his marrow and up the back of his neck. It grew worse as time went on. Even his undamaged muscles began to grow stiff and knotted from the tension of holding still in his uncomfortably upright position for so long.

Wait. Endure.

He could see through the veil over his father's eyes, now. Silently, he was praying for the continued suffering of the son he professed to love. He wanted to spend the next year nursing his ordinary, blessed son back to health, and then teach him how to honour the clan with a more honest sort of martial might. Kimimaro smiled. Perhaps his father would no longer love him afterwards, but this battle he _woul_ win, regardless of the cost.

In the last hour before the end, his grandfather's sister stood up and faced him with her Kaguya eyes, the same cold shade of green as his own. "Isn't this enough? He's just a child. If he were going to fail this test, he would have failed it a long time ago already. No mere child with the power to save himself this much suffering would resist for this long. It's unreasonable to think he even could."

Kimimaro's smile tried to widen, but he pressed his lips together and hoped it would be taken for an agonized grimace. He could feel the sun rising, though the interior of the hut was dark as ever. Soon. So soon. Ah, the pain, it was making his body tear itself to pieces around him, but he could wait just this little bit more.

He waited until the examiner stood up and took a deep breath, preparing to declare his success and congratulate him on this first long step towards fully recognized adulthood, early as it was.

He waited until he could see the profound relief on the faces of each of those who had come to watch him suffer for the sake of soothing their cowardice. They loved carnage, but they feared their own blood. They wanted to raise him to be a monster, but not _that_ sort of monster. They were ugly hypocrites.

This was his victory.

He waited until the examiner spoke the first two sentences of the ritual, slumped in his chair as if exhausted and beyond caring, until he saw every last scrap of anxiety shrivel away from the lines of their faces and a celebratory cheer set in. He waited until they began to smile.

Then, in the space between the third sentence and the fourth, he pulled his broken body together with an awful series of wet, cracking sounds, grew an extra pair of unnaturally sharp ulna, and tore through the straps like damp paper.

The new bones hurt, too, but it was such a different frequency of pain. The pain of the exam had been an exterior force visited upon him, something he had had to endure. This pain was something he had created himself, as a side effect of the power he had seized for himself. It needed a different name, he thought. It was not pleasure. It hurt, it hurt terribly, but there were a hundred threads of a strange, pale ecstasy woven all through it. He shivered a little.

The silence that fell then seemed to suck all the air out of the small room. The witnesses did their job, horrified and deeply unwilling, and witnessed his awakening.

There would be a price to pay for this, he knew. The old, pure Kaguya line had brought disaster to their world, over and over again, without fail. As its heir, he knew he would do nothing less.

Having nothing to say to the cowering wretches at his feet, he drew himself up and walked out without a word into the white blaze of a late autumn sunrise.

The price he learned of soon enough: the cage, and the leash, and the blood. But he was patient. He could wait, and endure, until the day his captors tried to make a bridge to the future out of nothing but false pride and all that traditional bloodthirst. Then they would drown, all of them, and give him his freedom with their death throes.

Kimimaro waited, and endured, and won his war with patience alone.

Then, lost, he went in search of a cage more to his liking.

And found one.

**END**


End file.
